Prof. Riyadh Al_Azzawi F.R.C.Psych Psychology Prof. Riyadh Al_Azzawi F.R.C.Psych

Psychology: Psychology touch every aspect of lives .it asks various questions about these aspects as how does the way your parents raised you affect the way you raise your own children ;what is the best treatment of drug dependency ; can a man care for an infant as capable as a woman can ;what effects does prolonged stress have on the immune system.. Psychologists are conducting research to find answers to these and many other questions. psychology also affects our lives through it’s influence on laws and public policy.

Psychology: Psychological theories and research have influenced laws dealing with discrimination; capital punishment ..etc. Because psychology affects so many aspects of our lives ;so people need to know something about psychology; to know how people think and act as they do and give us insight about our attitudes and reactions.

The scope of psychology: Psychology can be defined as the scientific study of the behavior and mental processes; examples: 1-brain damage and face recognition ;brain damage affect behavior ;when affecting certain areas it affects certain behavior while other persons behavior isn’t affected as in prosognosia in which the patient can’t recognize faces. 2-attributing traits to people i.e. asking for donation in a crowded place . 3-childhood amnesia. 4-obesity .one factor seems history of deprivation.

The scope of psychology: 5-effects of media violence on children aggression ;some consider TV violence affects children behavior while other regard it have cathartic effect. The more violent programs a boy watch at age 9 the more aggressive he is likely to be at age 19.

The historical origins of psychology: The roots of psychology can be traced to the great philosophers of ancient Greece as Socrates; Plato and Aristotle..They asked fundamental questions about human life and what is consciousness; are people inherently rational or irrational ; is there free choice; these questions are still important as before. other psychological questions deal with the nature of the body and human behavior also it has a long history. Hippocrates made many important observations about the brain controls various organs of the body which are the base for the biological perspective in psychology.

Nativism versus Empiricism: It centers on the question of whether human capabilities are inborn or acquired through experience. The nativist view says that human beings enter the world with an inborn store of knowledge and understanding of reality. In the 17th century Descartes supported this view he argued that some ideas such as God ; the self ;the geometric axioms; perfection; and infinity are innate. also he had the concept that the body is a machine that can be studied as other machines studied.

Nativism and Empiricism: The empiricist view says that knowledge is acquired through experiences and interactions with the world it is strongly associated with the 17th century English philosopher John Locke. According to Locke; at birth the human mind is a tabularasa or blank slate on which experience writes knowledge and understanding as the individual matures. This perspective gave birth to associationist psychology.Associationists denied that there were inborn ideas or capabilities. instead they argued that the mind is filled with ideas that enter by way of the senses and then become associated with one another through such principles as similarity and contrast. Current research on memory and learning is related to early association theory. these days the debate between nativism and empiricism is referred to as the nature /nurture debate .

The beginning of scientific psychology: It is usually considered to have begun in 1879 when Wundt established the 1st psychological lab. In the university of Leipzig in Germany. he started with the study of senses then his co-worker studied attention; emotion and memory he relied on introspection which refers to the observation and recording of the nature of one’s own perceptions; thought and feelings. The reliance on introspection particularly for very rapid mental events proved unworkable.

Structuralism and Functionalism: The term structuralism means the analysis of mental structures .The leader of the approach is E.B.Titchener.This approach opposed by another approach functionalism the leader of this approach is William James; He felt that less emphasis should be placed on analyzing the elements of mental structures and more on understanding it’s fluid personal nature. they include the study of behavior in the scope of psychology.

Behaviorism: Around 1920..it’s founder John B. Watson. He made no assertions on consciousness when he studied the behavior of animals and infants. He believed that psychological data must be open to public inspection like the data of any other science. Behavior is public while consciousness is private. Science should deal only with public facts. Behaviorists tended to discuss psychological phenomenon in terms of stimuli and response S-R psychology.

Gestalt psychology: 1912 appeared in Germany. Gestalt is a German word meaning form or configuration; used first by Max Wertheimer ;Kurtkoffka and Wolfgang Kocher all of them immigrated to U.S.A.They were interested in perception ;they believed that perception and experiences depend on then patterns formed by stimuli and on the organization of experience. What we actually see is related to the background against which an object appears as well as to other aspects of the overall pattern of stimulation. thus the whole is different from the sum of it’s parts ; since the whole depends on the relationships among the parts.

Psychoanalysis: Originated with Sigmund Freud around the turn of the 20th century. At the center of the theory is unconsciousness ;thoughts ; attitudes ; impulses ; wishes; motivations; emotions of which we are unaware. He believed that the unacceptable wishes of childhood are driven out of conscious and become part of unconscious but continue to influence our thought ; feelings and actions. Unconscious thoughts are expressed in various ways as dreams ; slip of tongue and physical mannerisms. In therapy he used free association and analysis of dreams. The motivations behind unconscious wishes almost always involve sex and aggression.

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